Books: Telling the Birth of a Nation

FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA

by Francis Parkman; Library of America; 2 volumes; 3,124 pages; $60

Contemporary historians like to pretend that they are not the people who make history. Self-conscious about their central role in carving out a portrait of the past, they lapse into academic mumbling. Pick a manageable (small) subject, process enough data, arrange all available figures into charts and graphs, studiously suppress any hint of narrative judgment or point of view, and truth will be served. As a result, libraries are filling up with inaccessible accuracy, exhaustively researched big books on tiny topics. But facts do not speak for themselves; they are not even facts until someone formulates them. History is always slanted in one way or another. Merely writing a single sentence imposes an arbitrary order on the flux of occurrence. An older school of historians, too long out of session, made a virtue of this necessity. Knowing that they could not help reshaping reality, they did so with gusto and exuberant style.

This was the method pursued by Francis Parkman (1823-93), a wealthy and well-bred Bostonian who entered Harvard in 1840 and began experiencing what he called “symptoms of ‘Injuns’ on the brain.” These soon led to an ambitious disease; the undergraduate decided to write the history of “the whole course of the American conflict between France and England.” This task, which lasted his lifetime, was fulfilled in seven books that were published between 1865 and 1892.

Parkman’s own labors seemed as heroic as the scope of his subject. He learned to shoot, ride a horse and maneuver a canoe, essential skills for the thousands of miles of travel that lay ahead. Mountains of old documents rose to test his fortitude. He fell victim to a variety of physical and nervous disorders. In the preface to an early volume, he mentions a vision problem that “has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all.” Somehow, he soldiered on.

Parkman’s strained, beleaguered life produced a stunning epic, stretching from French explorations during the latter years of the 15th century to the signing in 1763 of the Peace of Paris, in which France effectively relinquished all claims to the North American continent. Through it all, the historian occupies stage center, an entertaining, indispensable and highly opinionated witness.

His prejudices are clearly on view. The taming of the New World involved nothing less than the triumph of civilization over barbarism. Parkman’s treatment of the Indian is not a model of cultural relativism. The natives are almost invariably called “savages.” One prominent chief in what later became Quebec is described as a “greasy potentate.” The tortures that Indians inflicted upon Jesuit missionaries and prisoners from rival tribes receive constant attention. “It is needless to dwell on the scene that ensued,” Parkman writes of one such episode, which ended in cannibalism, and then dwells on it for a long paragraph and a footnote. His occasional attempts to make the Indians seem human are not awfully successful: “It should be noticed, in justice to the Iroquois, that, ferocious and cruel as past all denial they were, they were not so bereft of the instincts of humanity as at first sight might appear. An inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element, in their savage conception, of the character of the warrior.”

There were brutalities on the other side, of course, and Parkman’s portrayal of the invading Europeans is frequently unflattering. But they are, when the smoke clears, his people, and his loyalties to the two great nations competing for a vast continent divide in complex ways. His intellect allies him with the English, whose language and culture ultimately prevailed. His heart pulls him toward the French and their colorful, aristocratic heroes: Champlain, La Salle, Montcalm. An enterprise doomed to failure makes a more dramatic story than a brisk progress toward success: “The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand.”

Romance is the key to Parkman’s approach. His research unearthed massive evidence of human greed, cruelty, corruption and betrayal. Yet he never lost sight of the mythic struggle in which his flawed participants were locked. A world was up for grabs, and what a world it must have seemed at the time. Parkman’s regular descriptions of nature add up to his history’s dominant character: an unspoiled Edenic expanse that has been forgotten in fact and may soon be lost to memory as well. A view of Lake George, in New York State: “Like a fair Naiad of the wilderness, it slumbered between the guardian mountains that breathe from crag and forest the stern poetry of war. But all then was solitude; and the clang of trumpets, the roar of cannon, and the deadly crack of the rifle had never as yet awakened their angry echoes.”

Such passages help explain why Parkman’s work fell out of favor several decades after he died. The generation forged in the cauldron of World War I had learned to distrust high-flown, rhetorical speech. Romanticism was out, especially if it venerated the past. The last edition of Parkman’s history was published in 1926 and has been increasingly hard to find ever since. In reissuing it at this time, the Library of America fulfills its mandate: to collect and preserve classic American writing and make it available to all. Parkman is old-fashioned enough to appear brand new. And his grand saga, although based on facts, now reads like fascinating fiction, as good a candidate as any for the Great American Novel.

—By Paul Gray

Excerpt

“They embarked again, floating prosperously down between the leafless forests that flanked the tranquil river; till, on the sixth of February, they issued upon the majestic bosom of the Mississippi. Here, for the time, their progress was stopped; for the river was full of floating ice. La Salle’s Indians, too, had lagged behind; but, within a week, all had arrived, the navigation was once more free, and they resumed their course. Towards evening, they saw on their right the mouth of a great river. . . They built their campfires in the neighboring forest; and at daylight, embarking anew on the dark and mighty stream, drifted swiftly down towards unknown destinies.”